Bust Up thE furNiturE aND WiN
After selling his cell-phone distributor, Brightstar, in 2014, Marcelo Claure became a billionaire. He owns a soccer team, Club Bolívar, in his native Bolivia, and is working with pal David Beckham to bring an MLS team to Miami, his adopted hometown. Jennifer Lopez sang at his 40th-birthday party. He has five kids. So what is he doing in Kansas City trying to turn around Sprint? —As told to K.W.
ENTREPRENEURS ARE good for two things: starting businesses and turning them around. As an entrepreneur, you learn never to take no for an answer, and a turnaround is similar. People tell you it’s been done before and it’s never going to work. It is the exact same no you hear as a startup. I’ve told all my team that there are easier
jobs. The satisfaction needs to come from winning. And by the way, if we are successful, you will make money. Otherwise, you will not make money. When [SoftBank CEO] Masayoshi Son bought Sprint, he had already invested in Brightstar. He asked us to combine the procurement of Brightstar and Sprint. In less than eight weeks, we were able to save about $400 million. Because of that, Masa asked me to join Sprint’s board. Brightstar was also serving Verizon, Apple, and T-Mobile. That started to cause a few problems in the industry. When the government called us and kindly let us know there was no way they would approve the merger of Sprint and T-Mobile, Masa pulled me aside and said hey, I want to make you CEO of Sprint.
On day one, it was quite awkward. A 44-year- old Hispanic lands in Kansas City, Missouri. When I came to Sprint, all I saw at first were the TV crews waiting for me outside. It bothers me that I was the only Hispanic CEO of a Fortune 500 company. If I can do this, maybe I will open the doors for other Hispanic CEOs.
Sprint had the culture of a company that was losing. People arrived right on time, and they left right on time, too. The parking lot had traffic jams at 5 p.m. with people trying to get out. Sales meetings were monthly. There were lots of silos and no one talked to one another. My office, I swear, was bigger than my house.
This was probably the largest opportunity I was going to have in my life: to run a 118-year-old company [Sprint began life as the Brown Telephone Co. in 1899] with 60,000 employees and a brand name everyone knows. I told the employees I had never lost in my life and this was not going to be the first time. Either with them or without them, I was going to turn this company around.
We started daily sales and marketing meetings. I moved all the executives to one floor where we could all see one another. I got rid of offices and put everyone in cubes. The fact that people could talk to one another was a big shock. I had staff meetings every week. It was all new to me, and my first meeting went from 6 a.m. to 1 a.m. A few people fell asleep. I figured those people would not last. Maybe three of the original 20 members of the management team are with us today.
I started the Getting Better Every Day email, asking people how to make Sprint a better place. The first day I got four or five hundred emails. I wrote everyone back. Then we created a second email called Stupid Rules, asking people what rules we should get rid of. We got a few hundred more suggestions. Why should sales people have to wear dress shoes, which are uncomfortable, when they are on their feet for 12 hours?
At least half of this is cultural. We are halfway through a turnaround, but we are a different company than we were before. We are winning customers. We are back to generating operating income after seven years. We have free cash flow for the first time in 13 years.